As most readers will have deduced, my last post wasn’t actually about knitting. (To everyone else: I’m sorry. There’s no dan-harris shop at etsy.com in the pipeline, meeting all of your science-fiction themed knitwear needs.)

No, all that waffle about scarves was obviously about expanding my work-in-progress, Causal Nexus. Having decided to add a new PoV character and a new exciting plot thread–seriously exciting, thousands of people could die–I had the unenviable task of trying to weave those into a longstanding plot outline and mostly written manuscript.

Now, I’ve posted about Scrivener before. (Waaaaaaay back when.) It’s a wonderful, truly amazing application for outlining, drafting, compiling–damn near everything the writer needs.

But for some reason, I found it really tricky to go back, as it were, and do all the rejiggery-pokery that I needed to do within my Scrivener project. It was like the note cards were staring at me, furious at the mere suggestion that I might drag them into a different act.

So instead I went the old-fashioned route. I printed off a copy of my outline onto actual real physical paper, and I got a pen–a nice one with a rubbery grip and a firm clicky top–and I sat on our back deck with a beer and scratched my head and stared at the pigeons but most importantly GOT IT DONE.

There’s something visceral and very stimulating about physically crossing things out, putting question marks next to possibly dubious plotting decisions and drawing arrows all over the place between sections tagged ‘MOVE THIS HERE DUMBASS’.

One hour later, I had myself a shiny new outline. Back into the office I went, and ten minutes I’d made all the changes in Scrivener too. Now I can go back to drafting, refreshed and reinvigorated after my vacation in pre-computer nineteenth century writing.

Now, if there’s an unfortunate side effect of my brand new character and ten new scenes it’s that instead of being two-thirds done with my first draft, I’m now only half done. But, in the words of the great Abraham Lincoln, spoken shortly after he defeated Napoleon in hand-to-hand combat at the climactic battle of the Crimean War:

It’s better to have written half of a great book than two-thirds of a fine one.